Preliminary Programme

When British women organized to go to Chicago, they followed the guidelines defined by their American counterparts on the one hand from the Board of Lady Managers in charge of the Fair and the Women’s Pavilion and on the other hand from May Sewall, American suffragist and organizer of the Women’s World Congress. That infighting took place between the two sets of American women, Lady Managers and American suffragists, did not modify other national preparations per se, but could certainly exemplify what national female representations in Chicago showed about the women’s movement in their own countries. Both British women and British suffragists stood in both congress and fair, which did not mean that there were no tensions among themselves. French women followed their national (male) delegation, did not send a specific female delegation despite the Lady Managers’ request and had almost no representatives in the Congress. Paper III will develop the case study of Belgian women going/ not going to Chicago.
Women’s representation in Chicago could thus be read as a typology of national histories and tensions. But, at the same time, Chicago signaled a new era of female labeling that certainly showed the coming of age of new generations of women. The contention in this paper is that this international event boosted a new model for emancipation claims that was not solely that of British and American women; secondly, it re-designed the definition of ‘moderate women’ and ‘feminist women’ at the international level, a sweet music to their ears that softened national tensions in Chicago while it also consequently re-set national pictures.
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Museum building and art collecting in the nineteenth century United States started as a man’s affair. Women might spread their home-based authority through associations into morality-based reforms of schools, prisons and even the highly political realm of abolition, but the heavy cultural lifting of art collecting had to be left to their husbands with the big check books. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, when those collections found their way into museums, they had often been under the care of widows for several decades. Sarah Harrison, 1817-1906, outlived her husband the collector engineer Joseph Harrison, by 32 years. So it was she who maintained, expanded and then disposed of the family art collection that included some of America’s best known paintings. Anna Wilstach, 1822-1892, outlived her husband William P. Wilstach, the harness and leather magnate and collector, by 22 years. It was her will that left significant capital as well as paintings to the Philadelphia Museum of Art changing it from a teaching and technological institution into the collecting museum it is today. Louisine Havermeyer, 1855-1929, Mrs. Henry O. Havermeyer, outlived her collector husband by 22 years as well. Her bequests of great masters and impressionist paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art rank in importance with the gifts of J. P. Morgan, Robert Lehman and just a few others. This paper attempts to measure this feminizing of American cultural institutions at the very period that they were dropping their early educational vocation to become the cultural powerhouses we know. The Women’s Pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago offers an important window on this women’s work. The pavilion was decorated with works from these women’s collections and organized by another collecting woman, Bertha Palmer, who survived her husband, Potter Palmer, by 16 years. Both Bertha Palmer and Louisine Havemeyer were advised on their purchases by Mary Cassatt who along with Mary MacMonnies, painted large murals for the exposition. Far from being a feminist outpost in American culture, it is the contention of this paper that the Women’s Pavilion was the model for women’s use of culture and became a model for American museums of the first importance.

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This paper brings together an historical and economic approach to the French women’s contribution to the Chicago World Fair. The moderate feminist Marie Pégard was the driving force behind the decision to produce an elaborate series of statistical panels that presented women’s contribution to the French national and moral economy. Over one hundred delicately colored graphs and maps drew on demographic, economic and educational data showing women’s presence in schools, and the workplace, while also highlighting their economic resources through the comparative analysis of men’s and women’s savings accounts or women’s presence in emigration societies. Drawing on archival sources that illustrate the process that led to the making of this exhibit as well as its impact at the Fair and afterwards, the two speakers will explore the significance of the use of statistics to convey a feminist message while questioning the “reality” of the data used to convey this message.
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